At some time in this crazy journey I think we all reach a point where our future starts to become visible to us on the horizon.
While some of us seem to know, with a single minded conviction what it is we want to do from a very young age, others, myself included, take longer to figure things out.
I guess I was 22 when I first started to get an inkling of what "my future" looked like.
I was going to study fashion design. It was the first point in my life when I felt like I had something of a career plan.
Within two years I'd be married, and then start my own business.
in 2011 I realized I was going to become a parent.
This is what I mean be seeing your future on the horizon.
It felt good, it felt like I'd arrived somewhere, or at least would be soon.
it's easy and comforting to know where you're going. It can make up for a lot of things that perhaps seemed more important when you had less direction.
Things like, oh, I don't know, one's gender identity.
We humans are big on confirmation bias.
It's what our brains like to do. We come up with a story we like and we just make all the pieces fit.
Having a vision of your future is like finding the box lid to the puzzle you're working on. Finally you can see where all the bits are meant to go.
Never mind the fact that you're pulling puzzle pieces from a pot that contains ALL the pieces from every puzzle ever made.
Never mind the fact you picked up the box lid off a stack of thousands or others.
The important thing is that you have a lid, and you have pieces, and you know what to do.
You're going to make them fit.
For the last few years I had been drawing pieces from the pot and for the life of me, I couldn't find them in the picture. So I set them aside and drew more, and more, and more.
To be honest I'd been building a stack of these other pieces behind me for 32 years and I don't know what happened exactly to may me look around and see that the pieces that didn't fit with my box lid now outnumbered the ones that did but there it was.
Almost a year ago now, in August sunshine, I started looking through all those puzzle sections and began to find that a lot of them fit together, more than I'd assembled in my other puzzle.
The thing is, most puzzles look pretty similar, so I could see that these new sections I was assembling
could work with what I'd built. I just needed to find a new lid to go by.
And now I'm going to break with this puzzle analogy and say.
Everything in my life has changed to a greater or lesser extent in the space of one year.
I think part of what make those of us who are Trans* so damn scary to some people is that our existing casts doubt on a lot of the experiences people take for granted.
I can honestly say there is not a single part of my life experience that has been untouched by transition.
I think differently.
I feel differently.
My likes and dislikes have changed in ways I didn't expect.
The world sees me differently, and I see it differently.
Whatever part of myself I thought constituted me before I began transition, I was wrong.
I no longer have any assumptions that any part of me is immutable, essential or in any way core to my being.
My relationships with friends and family have changed. Mostly for the better, but often in unexpected ways.
Those things that looked like my future on the horizon, all of them have gone or changed to such a degree that I can no longer see what my future looks like.
I am no longer married.
I no longer own my own business.
I no longer see my daughter every day.
My life looks very, very different from a year ago, and even from three months ago.
I'm realizing that I don't even know if I want to continue working in the fashion industry.
While that future vision was built piece by piece over a lifetime until I was comfortably ensconced in predictability, it has been swept away almost wholly and in a few months. I don't have anything fixed in my future after my trip to Korea.
2014, like most of this year, is a land of wild untamed possibility.
It's both liberating and scary as all get out.
I was thinking, back last year before I came out as trans, about how different our experience of time is when we are children compared to when we're adults.
I am a child again. I feel like I have lived lifetimes in the last year. That's the beauty of this. To get to come into each day with eyes of wonder.
But I'm not a child and I need to make my own way in this world and that means having some sort o a plan.
But what?
I have almost too many choices, and I can't guarantee that what sounds like a good direction right now will still feel like such a great decision in a few months or a year.
Honestly, I want to get paid to be me. Being me is too interesting right now to want to spend much time doing anything else, and unlike almost everything else, it's one of the few things tat I'm confidant I'll still enjoy doing a year from now.
Where is the line between narcissism and authenticity exactly?
I want to work in a think tank.
Somewhere I can explore the weird leaps of understanding my brain makes constantly.
Or perhaps in marketing, which is a splendid mix of psychology and applied statistics.
I'm also finding myself drawn porn, although I suspect I'm a little old for the industry at this point. Whatever, I'm enjoying being unashamed of myself for the first time in my life and I want to put out all out there. I've always been an exhibitionist at heart, but you can't exhibit what your not. That's called acting.
Maybe I can just find a way to make money being me. There are more than a few people who've turned blogs and you tube channels into careers.
I'm open to any and all suggestions folks.
Throw your box lids this way.
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